Former officer with the Almoradí Local Police has filed a claim for damages against the City Council, seeking 15,000€ in compensation for losses he attributes to his exclusion from an internal promotion process for officer. The claim alleges that the City Council utilised a different criterion for calculating seniority in 2022 than the one applied two years later in a similar process.
The conflict stems from a call for applications to fill a Local Police officer position in Almoradí through internal promotion. Among the requirements stipulated in the application guidelines were being a career civil servant within the municipal force and having served at least two years as a civil servant in the immediately lower rank.
Exclusion in 2022
The provisional list, approved in March 2022, included one admitted applicant and four excluded. The police officer now making the appeal was excluded because the City Council interpreted the requirement as meaning that the two years of service had to have been served as a tenured civil servant, without counting the period previously worked as a temporary officer.
The affected individual filed an appeal against that decision, but the City Council upheld the exclusion from the final list approved in September of that year. Subsequently, he filed an appeal for reconsideration, which was also dismissed in October 2022. The claim now filed challenges that criterion after learning how the City Council handled another internal promotion process in 2024. According to the document, in this second process, the City Council accepted the counting of time served as a temporary employee to accredit the seniority of another applicant. The claimant argues that both cases were based on substantially equivalent requirements and maintains that the City Council applied two different interpretations.
However, the document itself also includes the explanation offered by the Administration for this difference. The municipal resolution corresponding to the 2024 procedure reportedly invoked a ruling by the High Court of Justice of the Valencian Community from November 2023 to indicate that the judicial interpretation of the requirement had changed and that the services could be counted regardless of whether they had been provided as a tenured or temporary civil servant.
Compensation of 15,000 euro
The document attributes moral and professional damages, as well as a loss of opportunity for advancement, to the exclusion. It also maintains that the inability to participate in that competitive examination would have delayed his professional and salary progression. For these reasons, he sets the requested compensation at 15,000€. This amount is based on the claimant’s own valuation and not on an appraisal or court ruling in this case.
The claim is a petition submitted through administrative channels, not a legal claim or a court ruling, so the considerations regarding discrimination, arbitrariness or abnormal functioning of the Administration are part of the claimant’s arguments and have not been declared as proven facts in this procedure.
The document cites various rulings and constitutional principles on equality in access to public employment, arbitrariness, and patrimonial liability to support its request.
The request now put forward therefore requires resolving a specific administrative question: whether the exclusion suffered in that selection process and the subsequent application of another criterion in the 2024 call generate patrimonial liability for the Almoradí City Council and, if so, whether there is compensable damage.
